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Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the memoir In the Dream House and the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. Machado’s essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, VQR, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Michener-Copernicus Foundation, Elizabeth George Foundation, CINTAS Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Machado is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

The post Non-Fiction by Non-Men: Carmen Maria Machado appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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Let me disclose two things up front. This past year I was an editorial intern at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency, working for, among others, Monica Byrne’s agent. I also, like Byrne, went to Wellesley College, though she graduated seven years before me. While I have yet to meet Byrne through either of these channels, I heard a lot of buzz about her debut novel The Girl in the Road and could not wait to read it as soon as it came out. Just as one of the heroines of The Girl in the Road, Mariama, develops an infatuation with a goddess-like woman named Yemaya, I became obsessed with Byrne from afar before her book was even published. My feelings have only magnified since finishing her novel.

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